


no hands are half as gentle

by simplyprologue



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: A Little Bit of Death, Angst, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, It's a Conclave After All, Monarchy Angst, Post Episode: s04e09 DNR, Smug Leaders at the End of the World, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-01
Updated: 2017-05-01
Packaged: 2018-10-26 04:52:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10779951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplyprologue/pseuds/simplyprologue
Summary: Clarke, always thinking she can hold the world together with her two hands. It would be insolence, if she wasn’t so goddamn earnest about it.When Roan is injured in the Conclave, Clarke decides the time of playing fair has passed.





	no hands are half as gentle

**Author's Note:**

> **A/N:** This will likely be AU in three days barring any psychic proclivities yet unknown to me, but it was fun to write. And by "fun" I mean "I love torturing characters I love."

He’s been sat there for over an hour, in the dark and damp, waiting for death. His leg - a bloodied mess of muscle and bone, glistening and twisted and though he does not dare touch the ruin, certain to never work again — is promising a slow demise, since Octavia refused him the mercy of her blade. For not the first time, he examines the room she pitched him into before leaving him to re-enter the fight. It is some middling hour of the night, and while the Skairipa was gracious enough to dump him in what were shadows an hour ago, he is now bathed in moonlight. Still, the narrow entrance to the dwelling means he will hear a quick death coming for him long before one of the remaining champions guts him.

Roan looks at the small blade in his hand, considering if he’s waiting too long, that soon he will be without the strength to slice his own throat if he decides to. With a sigh, he drops his hand to his lap again. _Maybe,_ just maybe, he has enough fight in him left to take out someone coming in through the low doorway, and that’s if they don’t see him first. Outlast the rest, claim the bunker for Azgeda, and die a good death.

But _maybe_ seems to be an overestimation — he’s drowsy, his body answering the call to rest, to heal, no matter how useless it is.

When he manages to escape the current of exhaustion, it’s because of a banging coming from the floor, and then a sudden metallic whine of a hatch being opened. Debating the finer merits of bargaining with the intruder, Roan lolls his head onto his shoulder, and waits for them to reveal themselves.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he spits.

Wanheda, always exactly where she shouldn’t be.

“Saving you,” she hisses back, closing the hatch before scurrying over to him. “What else would I be doing here?”

Clarke, always thinking she can hold the world together with her two hands. It would be insolence, if she wasn’t so goddamn _earnest_ about it. “So we’ve all given up on the pretense of playing fair, then? Still doesn’t explain why you’ve come to _me_.”

“Octavia signaled your location. It took a bit of time, navigating the tunnels. Rock Line has the entire eastern sector trapped,” she mutters, setting out a kit and unpacking it.

“Why are you here?”

Shaking a flashlight in her hand until it lights up into a greenish glow, she continues to ignore the point. “You’re injured.”

“Why are you here _,_ Clarke?” he asks again.

Giving him a hard look, she stands, ripping a tarp away from a table and pinning it to the windows — she becomes a silhouette in the darkness, her expressions hidden from him. “Because you’re going to die, unless I help you.”

“I’m going to die anyway. _Why_ are you here?”

She kneels down beside him again, and somehow he manages to find his fingers around her wrist, pulling her to him until her face is right in front of his, and he can examine whatever her latest treachery is. The mask she wears is not that of the fearless diplomat, nor the brash Commander of Death. Just of a girl. Roan thinks it isn’t a mask at all, when she bites her lip, carefully extracting herself from his weakening hold on her.

“Bellamy and Echo came to an agreement, one that suits all of us. If Azgeda should win the Conclave, then we would have one hundred spots in the bunker for Skaikru.”

“Would have had. Don’t know if you can tell, but I’ve lost,” he answers, slumping back against the wall. Then, warily, “Why did Echo agree?”

“If Skaikru wins, we only need three hundred, four hundred maximum for our own people.”

There are at least five hundred living members of the Sky People, from what Roan knows, but he says nothing at her lowered estimation.

“I imagine your Chancellor is quite popular at the moment,” he says instead. Octavia has four deaths in this Conclave already, two in the initial scrum outside the tower. Barring injury or an ambush, he knows she has good odds to win the day — and so Kane must be fielding many offers of alliance to help tip the battle in her favor by the clan leaders willing to compromise their honor for survival under Skaikru’s banner.

She answers simply.

“Yes.”

“Why are you here, Clarke?” he asks again. “I lost. Bellamy’s deal with Echo no longer serves your people.”

“Octavia still might win.”

He laughs bitterly. He knows _that._ “But I lost. What kind of king—”

“The kind who lives to _save his people_ Roan,” she answers fiercely, but when her hands brace the sides of his face, they are gentle. “Do you want to be remembered as the king who allowed the sun to set on the blazon of the Ice Nation, or as the king who brought his people from the brink of destruction back to glory. In a thousand years, how do you want to be remembered?”

In thousand years, will anyone remember them at all? Who will remember the names of the Ice King and the Commander of Death? A thousand years, a thousand more, and it all may finally equal a zero sum when the prices on their souls are tallied up.

“But why are you here, Clarke?”

“Because I want to save everyone.” Her mouth twists into a grim smile. “I know you don’t believe me—”

“I’ve always believed you,” he interrupts her, because now in this dark room, his leg a ruinous mess, it does not matter what he does or does not believe. “It’s what makes you so dangerous. I might have let you ascend, had I thought you were only in it to save yourself. If you’d brought me another compromise, one that served us both. One hundred spots isn’t enough. Not when I could have it all, save twelve hundred Ice Nation. If I hadn’t — how could I call myself their king?”

She sits, legs folded at her side. Hands busying with the contents of her pack, she takes her time to respond. “You’re a good king, Roan. I stand by that. Your people need you.”

“I lost.”

And in his word — their world, now, or perhaps it has been ever since this strange woman was flung from the sky, even before the first murmurs about the demons from the sky reached his exile in the badlands — losing means death.

“You _fought,”_ she says, like it makes all the difference. “Your mother blew up my people in Mount Weather who were there on a medical mission, offered _you_ up like a lamb for the sacrifice to fight Lexa. She didn’t fight for anyone, not even herself.”

With a short laugh, he closes his eyes, lets his head tip upwards against the wall.

“And yet they loved her.”

“They don’t know you, not like I do. You were gone for three years.”

“That was the trick of it, what Lexa did.” He doesn’t open his eyes, letting his hands rest at his sides, palms up. His leg throbs, but the pain is cinder and smoke in comparison to the initial strike of the sword to his thigh. The sizzle and hiss of burning flesh, the brands that marked him as Azgeda, as his mother’s heir, as a unit commander — they all prepared him for this fire. He keeps speaking. “But my mother never intended for me to follow her on the throne. From the time Ontari was brought to her as a baby, she’d plan for Ontari to rule everything. For the throne in Atoga to become one with the throne in Polis. And Ontari was exactly who my mother raised her to be, and they would have loved her.”

Clarke is the sound of zippers on fabric, the flicking of clasps on plastic cases.

“And who are you?” she asks, voice as soft as silk covering steel.

“The king of ash and ruin,” he replies in monotone — the first reports of the wall of fire came from the far North in the hour before the Conclave began. This is how Azgeda falls. Not to the Mountain, not to Trikru, not to any of his mother’s enemies, real or perceived. “She sent me to Polis, when I was younger. To smooth the way for Ontari’s rule, I guess. I was in Polis, when she sent Costia’s head to Lexa’s bed. I was bound and thrown into a cell before I’d even heard what my mother had done. But Lexa didn’t kill me, not even then.”

Exile gave him rougher hands, a stronger back, and new brands.

“Your people will love you. They just don’t know you,” she says. “Give them the chance.”

He’s not certain he knows what love is, if not his mother’s scolding voice when he flinches, ten years old, receiving fealty marks on his shoulders with the royal blacksmith’s brands.

A bolt of pain strikes from his knee up to his back, all the way to his skull. Head swimming, he bites his teeth down on a groan. He is a king, and kings do not flinch. Were it that he was still a prince, and his mother was here to remind him of that — tears leak from his eyes, curling down his cheeks. And Clarke must notice, because she’s on her knees in front of him again, her palm cool against his forehead as she mutters nonsense.

“How many champions are left?” he asks, looking away.

“Four, besides you.”

“Luna?”

“Alive,” she answers flatly. The first alliance, even before the Conclave began, was to kill her first — and though Clarke had disagreed then, he wonders if she’s changed her mind. “The fighting has moved to the eastern quarter of the city, for now.”

“Just let me die,” he says, because it’s the first thought that enters his mind.

“No,” she replies, just as flatly. “I need you alive, for peace to hold when we shut the bunker door with one hundred Azgeda inside of it.”

“Peace,” he scoffs.

A mistake, because his head hurts worse.

“I won’t give up on Lexa’s legacy. Not until I’m dead.”

“Well, considering you’re the only one of us liable to survive praimfiya on the outside, you’ve got some time yet.”

He might have offered her a place inside of Azgeda’s bunker, had he thought she would take it. Had he been able to justify it to himself, that having the mighty Wanheda’s power would be an asset in the new world, that it would keep her from saving her people in another, from commanding death to halt once more. That she would be unable to rally any survivors with her silver tongue, to rise up against them once the doors were open, that they would control the flame but she the Natblidas.

He watches her, gold hair like lightning in the dark.

That Wanheda would make an undoubted Ice Queen. That her power would bring strength to the bloodline. That he finds himself raking his eyes over her figure, her rounded hips and narrow waist, her full breasts and pink lips. He knows nothing about love, but that her betrayal stung him when she sounded the ascension call.

She sits back on her haunches, bracing her hands on her thighs as she surveys the tools she’s lain out.

“This is going to hurt,” she says as her hands enter his wounds, a flashlight held in the cradle between her jaw and shoulder.

Fisting his hand at his side, he bangs it on the ground, swallowing down a howl. Her prodding fingers leave careful, delicate touches that make him want to scream. Blood weeps from his thigh, Clarke ripping the tear in his pants wider, so she has a better view of her operating field.

“You have a comminuted fracture and a large open wound, and it’s a miracle a bone shard hasn’t sliced open the artery. I need to set your leg before we can move you — my mother can put your leg back together once we get you to the Embassy. But I’m going to give you morphine, it’s a strong painkiller.”

“I don’t want it.”

He doesn’t need anymore of her miracles of science.

“You need it.”

His lips curl into a snarl. “I didn’t have any when you and your mother removed the bullet from my chest. I don’t need it now.”

“You were unconscious then. You’re awake now,” she retorts, quirking her eyebrows towards her hairline, fingers hovering close.

“No.”

“I’ll be able to set it quicker, with less of a chance of doing it wrong because you’re writhing and moving around,” she explains, more patronizing than comfortable, and if he was less tired he’d call her out on that, too. “If I open up your femoral artery, you will bleed out in _six seconds_ and _you will be dead.”_ Pursing her lips, she takes a deep breath, looks him straight in the eye.

“Roan, please.”

He curses her in sleng.

“Fine.”

The syringe is already in her hand, and Roan thinks she was going to give it to him anyway, regardless of his consent. Still, he bares the hollow of his arm to her, watching as she triggers first the release, and then the medicine itself. With a steady grip, she slowly pushes it into his bloodstream.

“This may make you nauseous, especially if you have an empty stomach. If you feel like you’re going to be sick, let me know and I can give you something to help with that,” she explains, eyes flickering to his. “It’ll take a few minutes to fully take effect. Now I’m going to prepare the instruments I’ll need, and a coagulant I’ll give you once I’m done to help with clotting.”

Steady still, she extracts the needle, and with a dab of cotton applies pressure to the entry site.

“What do you need to do?”

The drug she’s given him is heady, burning its way through his body. He does not feel less, he thinks, just far away from it, the pain in his leg dwindling to an uncomfortable pressure. His head, however, feels as if it’s floating feet above his shoulders.

“It’s called an external fixation.” She holds up a steel bar demarcated by six long nails, turning it in her hands. “I’m going to put these pins, attached to this rod, into your leg. It’ll stabilize the bone during transportation, and my mother might not even do anything else depending on the extent of your injuries. Then I’m going to take the cauter and close up the sources of the bleeds, put in some temporary stitches to hold the musculature together to make sure it doesn’t open up again.”

“That’s barbaric,” he grits out, trying to summon up a modicum of anger. But none comes. Weakly, he says, “You told me this after you drugged me on purpose.”

“And I think _your_ people are savages?” she jokes, cupping his jaw.

“It worked,” he says, the consonants of his words turning soft.

“I know.” She’s forgiven him, maybe, for stopping her gambit. Her tools are on the other side of her, and he can’t see them as she selects from them. “Historically, surgeons were also barbers. They were the ones with the sharpest blades. A barber-surgeon could go from a haircut to an amputation all in one — did you hear that?”

Footsteps carrying someone across wet pavement.

Towards them.

“Is that one of your people?” he slurs, cursing himself again for letting her drug him, and pushes himself up in a futile measure to appear uninjured.

Her mouth drops open, eyes focusing on a point in the midair. “No, they’re all—”

“Hide.”

Pulling another tarp down from the table, he covers the lights and her pack.

“But—”

Clarke kneels over him, and he pushes her away, towards the shadows. The footfalls draw closer, and with each step they’re lighter, slower.

“Hide,” he seethes. “Now.”

And for once, she listens to him, retreating to the corner of the room and into absolute blackness. Hands shaking, head filled with clouds, he reaches for his dagger and folds it into his hand. He blinks, a cascade of purple-white lights filling his vision, reality skittering sideways for a moment before it clears.

He knows it's her before she says anything.

“Your highness.”

The irony is a sickening sweetness in his stomach. “Natblida.”

“Octavia said you were dead. I knew she was lying.” Luna walks in moonlight as if it’s her birthright, and maybe it is. Maybe her parents saw the nature of her blood and named her for the moon that yoked the night.

Grimacing, he fights a wave of tremors. “And where is Octavia now?”

Stepping in and out of the shadows, she saunters towards him.

“Why should I give you the satisfaction of an answer?”

“So she’s alive. You’d be crowing about it, if you’d managed to kill Skairipa,” he answers, as much to taunt her as to placate Clarke to remaining in her hiding place. “You’ve come to finish off a dying man instead, rather than the others?”

The smile on her face is not cruel. It just is. He stops himself from looking to where Clarke is hiding, keeps his gaze on Luna, covered in red, red blood that is not her own.

“I’ve come to give you mercy, Roan kom Azgeda.”

“Fuck your mercy.” He spits the words at her feet; there is no peace for any of them now, and some of that is on his head.

But just as much of it is on hers, for refusing her own ascension call and fleeing her first Conclave. On his mother’s, on every Ice King and Queen the whole line back, on every unfortunate soul who survived priamfiya, on everyone who sought sanctuary in the sky.

Not a single one of them is innocent, not if it’s come to this.

“I’d like for this to be over by daylight,” she says, kneeling. Her blade glints, red. “It may take you longer than that to die.”

“Why bother, when we’d all be dead in a few days?”

“None of us deserve to live. First we destroyed the Earth. Now we destroy each other. Humanity is a stain upon the soil. But whoever comes after us, may our bodies nourish the soil for them,” she whispers, sad. If her soul still has room enough for sadness. “Yu gonplei ste oden.”

Her knife is at his throat, and in the moment before he considers striking at her — injuring Luna would put Octavia and the other champions at an advantage, but would it keep Luna in this room longer, risk exposing Clarke? — Luna is knocked off of him, her knee entering the wreckage of his leg. His vision whites out, and he gasps, clutching the sides of thigh. The table clatters to its side, then breaks, and half a second later the sound of a body hitting the ground echoes through the room.

Then, Clarke’s voice. “Yu gonplei ste oden, Luna kom Floukru.”

And just like that, Clarke of the Sky People is the last known Nightblood. Pain bubbles in his stomach, churning bile up his throat. He forces his eyes open. Dropping a scalpel from her hand to the ground, Clarke leaps over Luna’s body to his side — in time for him to empty the contents of his stomach into her lap. She pays it little mind, rubbing small circles in-between his shoulder blades with one hand and preparing another dose of something with the other.

He considers asking her why she saved his life.

Again.

Luna’s death will be recorded as his kill in the Conclave, not that he thinks Clarke cares much about cheating death or cheating, more generally. The rules apply when she cares for them to, and only then.

“No one was ever going to play fair,” he mutters, accepting the drink of water she offers him.

She hums. “You were counting on that.”

“What would you have me do?”

Whatever she’s given him now is tugging him below the surface, or maybe it’s just all his blood decorating the ground… her clothes… Luna’s body. Clarke pets his hair as his vision narrows, grows darker.

“You’re gonna be fine, okay?” she says, voice half an octave too high.

Roan opens his mouth to disagree with her, or ask her what she means, or doesn’t mean — but his words turn into a soft exhale, as the hand of sleep pulls him down into the deep. He hears Clarke calling his name once, then twice, then feels her knuckles brushing across his sternum. Seconds crash into minutes and into what could be long, dreamy hours. He hears a drill, feels an immense pressure on his leg, but nothing more than that. Then more voices, the same metallic whine of the hatch being opened before he’s placed onto a stretcher and carried, the pace lulling him down into a deeper sleep.

When he awakens, it is inside grey walls illuminated by electric lamps.

When he awakens, her face is hovering over his, and he knows that Octavia has won.

“Has it hit yet?” he rasps.

She presses a cold compress to his cheeks. “One more day, they think. It’s as far as Arkadia, now — our, _my_ people, who decided to stay behind. We’ve lost contact, so they’re closing the door tonight.” Her voice chokes with emotion, but she stifles it quickly. “Echo has been working with Bellamy, getting your people here. But we won’t close it until the absolute last moment.”

“A hundred?”

It is better than none.

“More. Priamfiya wiped out many, even before the Conclave was over,” she explains, words twisting with suppressed grief. She checks the needle in his arm. “Some of the leaders refused our offer.”

“Who?”

“It’s just us. Skaikru, Trikru, and Azgeda. Trishanakru refused our offer, and then the rest started to turn us down.”

He huffs a laugh. “We might have saved ourselves the fight, then.”

A weary smile is born, lives briefly, and dies upon her lips. “I tried. I tried to save everybody.”

If she didn’t, he might love her less — a thought that sparks briefly in his mind, before it is subsumed by the medicine in his veins and carried away. For she is ruthless, charting her path before taking the first step and refusing to deviate. But he doubts even _she_ entered Mount Weather with the intent of irradiating every last man, woman, and child — why else would he have found her, wandering the woods in disguise, grief bearing down on her bones like frost on a flower?

“You saved your people,” he reminds her.

Her features are shaped by disgust, and she turns away. “Not all of them. There were forty-two, in Arkadia, who stayed behind. We got one back. _One._ We started dying even before we hit the ground. That was two. When we left the camp at the Dropship, the Trikru army had taken out — we had fifty-four left, and forty-eight had been captured by the Mountain. Almost all the people I was sent down here with are dead.”

Reaching into a drawer next to the bed, she retrieves another syringe. She stands, adjusting the tubes hooking into his arm. He tries to grab her wrist, tries to roll to grab any part of her, but his leg is locked into traction, and his arm doesn’t have enough reach.

“From the ashes, we will rise,” he says.

It meant nothing, six weeks ago. Now it means everything.

Their ancestors survived. So will they, and in five years the earth will be green and overgrown. Cleansed, and wiped anew. And they can all try again, and even Azgeda may find itself changed by the fire.

It would need a Queen.

 _He_ would need a Queen, like…

“You’re still here, Clarke.”

She pushes the medicine from the syringe into his arm, and his blood wipes his mind clean. The last thing he sees is Clarke’s face framed by uncombed golden hair, and the worried frown upon her face.

When he awakens next, the world as he’s always known it is gone.

And so is she.

In his fist is a piece of paper, torn from a book. On it, in what must be Clarke’s hand, is _Mebi oso na hit choda op nodotaim._

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
